[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What's the next big thing in computing / pro...
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Ask HN: What's the next big thing in computing / programming?
I managed to surf some of the software hype waves, some like "AI"
have not really benefitted me in a major way and some, like crypto
I deliberately ignore by now. What do you think is the next big
thing in programming or computers/Internet in general? I'm thinking
low-code or no-code tools that are actually composable by
programmers perhaps? How about something in the physical space -
are we going to see more types of wearables, for example? Basically
I'm looking for ideas on what to focus my learning on in 2022.
Author : xchaotic
Score : 54 points
Date : 2021-12-20 15:02 UTC (7 hours ago)
| r_hoods_ghost wrote:
| If Musk gets Starship to work and is successful in driving down
| the costs of launching material into LEO by another couple of
| orders of magnitude as intended then you can expect to see an
| explosion in the numbers of cheap and cheerful cubesats, not to
| mention experimental LEO factories and general weird stuff
| floating around in orbit. There will be a massive need for people
| to write control code and to process the data coming in. Unlike
| in the past the emphasis will be on knocking out "good enough"
| code, rather than something that is written to NASA standards,
| because the hardware being launched will be so cheap and the
| launch costs even cheaper. It is hard to get a grip on just how
| much more stuff is going to be up there by the end of the decade,
| all of which will require software writing for it.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| GPU computing will probably grow a lot. As it's physically
| impossible to scale up the frequency, we need to parallelize
| programs to increase the speed of computation.
| captaincrowbar wrote:
| (1) The cloud will continue to grow. Cloud-related stuff like
| Azure and Docker will continue to be a good learning investment.
|
| (2) Once Microsoft work enough of the bugs out, which I'm
| guessing will take another 2-3 years, I suspect Windows on ARM
| will be the Next Big Thing, or at least one of the Big Next-ish
| Things. ARM supplanting Intel will be a general Thing.
| f0e4c2f7 wrote:
| VR and 3D development.
|
| It's much bigger than games.
|
| There are some frameworks that are just now hitting their stride
| that make it 10x easier to build virtual worlds. Unreal Engine 5
| in particular has been interesting to me. Even today we are
| seeing people who work full time in VR now. (mostly lower wage
| employees in low cost of living countries). But I've also met
| people who are self employed in VR making avatars for people in
| VR chat or that sort of thing.
|
| It's harder now with covid but if you have a chance to try VR
| somewhere definitely do, it helps if you can experience it first
| hand.
| adampk wrote:
| Spatial computing.
|
| If all of reality is able to be piped into Unity (structure of
| static environment, motion of sensors, dynamic object poses) you
| can build Reality Apps the same as you can build video games.
|
| You can give people spidey-senses or "the force". Everything will
| have a UX.
| 0235005 wrote:
| I would like to say federated social networks, but it all depends
| on how big companies are treated by US antimonopoly rulings
| skadamat wrote:
| Real personal computing, that benefits end-users on their terms.
| In the Future of Coding community, we often use the analogy of
| "home cooking". As in, we have restaurants & professional chefs
| but not enough home cooks in computing. Tools & processes are
| super different when you're cooking for yourself / family vs for
| a restaurant!
|
| There are a few trends that are tiptoeing on the edges here:
|
| - tools for thought / creative tools (Muse, Nodes.io, Mem, etc)
|
| - end-user programming (people trying everything from visual PL's
| to simpler / more constrained programming interfaces)
|
| - local-first software (https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-
| first/)
|
| - web3 - I'm biased here and a bit skeptical of the fervor here,
| but matches some of the ethos / philosophy
|
| - more customizable / hackable personal computing hardware
| (https://frame.work/)
|
| - spatial + tactile computing so the body can participate in the
| thinking process (instead of only the 'head'):
| https://dynamicland.org/
|
| - explorables, games / interactive viz to quickly transfer rich
| context: https://explorabl.es/
|
| - video games, often indie ones, are exploring deep ideas: see
| Zachtronics games, Jonathan Blow's games, some of Annapurna
| Interactive funded games, etc. So many!
|
| - open data: better end-user data tools so anyone can understand
| the systems around them
| desireco42 wrote:
| This! I believe while we have this powerful machines at our
| fingertips, we still haven't scratched the surface of them
| being useful. And now, people think more about how to get
| customers then how to make useful stuff that people would love
| to use and it would make their life better.
| jose-cl wrote:
| check this jose (personal reminder)
| mjlee wrote:
| It's not very obvious, but if you click the "5 hours ago"
| next to the username you get the option to favourite a
| comment.
| WA wrote:
| 2022? Probably focus on the big things of 2021. Not much will
| change within a year.
|
| 2032? Hard to say, but it is quite possible that software and the
| web will actually look quite similar to what we have now. I found
| the concepts in this presentation quite intriguing [1]. Some
| stuff like airplanes haven't changed THAT much in the last 50
| years, because they are good enough for their purpose.
|
| [1]: https://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm
| xchaotic wrote:
| airplanes haven't changed much because safety is paramount and
| every crash is big PR fiasco so planes have not changed much
| because the industry is heavily regulated and there are duopoly
| players in the commercial space (Boeing/Airbus). But I concur
| with some of your thesis...
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| Not that you're wrong, but there seems to be this implicit
| assumption on hn of unbounded potential for innovation, when
| it stands to reason that most things are going to hit
| asymptotic growth at some point.
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| Digital Personal Assistants. What we have now are like the early
| mobile phones: Large, bulky and don't work very well.
|
| Imagine a personal assistant that you could have a full on
| conversation with. I don't believe this requires full-blown AGI
| to achieve, but improvements in language and human understanding
| by ML might get us there.
|
| Think something like the Computer from Star Trek NG.
| vzaliva wrote:
| I believe that formal verification is the next big thing. The
| problem with software reliability and security becoming the most
| critical one and this is the way to tackle it. There is
| sufficient research in academia which could be used as a
| foundation to build tools for the industry.
| tester756 wrote:
| but is formal verification required/needed to solve latest
| security issues?
|
| I mean those related to: CPUs, NPM, External Libraries, parsers
| written in unsafe languages
| vzaliva wrote:
| In short: Yes. In many cases having solid formal foundation
| allows to fomulate high-level properties which would allow to
| catch even bugs like recent log4j. There is alreay a lot of
| work on formalization of ISA/CPU definitions which could
| allow to catch low-level bugs/expoloits.
| tjansen wrote:
| "catch even bugs like recent log4j"
|
| How could it help with that? JNDI lookups were a documented
| feature of log4j. An incredibly dangerous one, but it was
| intended to work like that.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Well... it _might_ have raised a red flag about how
| incredibly dangerous the feature was, because there would
| be no way to make the verification shut up about the code
| that implemented the feature (if the verification did a
| good job).
|
| I don't know about log4j, but in the case of many such
| features, there would be a PM or somebody insisting that
| you have to implement his pet idea, no matter how much
| the tool screams.
| kennu wrote:
| Web3 will go through its current hype cycle peak (with lots of
| people both hyping and hating it), and in a few years we will see
| what actually comes of it. I predict we will find some
| interesting unforeseeable use cases for decentralized
| computing/currency, but it'll take some time.
| alex_duf wrote:
| I have a bit of a knee-jerk reaction every time I hear web3,
| and immediately picture somewhat interesting tech with not that
| many practical applications.
|
| I'm possibly lacking vision, so I'm wondering if anyone could
| share interesting examples of that (old) new wave of
| technology?
| thaufeki wrote:
| I'm not sure that I like the term 'Web3', as it implies that
| everything will move in that direction, which I don't think
| will be the case. I just refer to it as the Decentralized Web.
| Centralization has many benefits over Decentralization and vice
| versa. Its a very healthy thing to happen though.
|
| I do think it has a place, and is a promising emerging market.
| Which is why I've been interested in learning development in
| that area.
| kennu wrote:
| It's not too important for me what the name is, but I think
| the boat already sailed and the name Web3 will stick. When
| Web 2.0 was being born, the name wasn't that important
| either. It's just a social phenomenon that we need a common
| moniker to refer to the technology/culture at a high level.
| thecleaner wrote:
| Web3 means using UDP as the backbone protocol and with hole-
| punching it makes P2P interactions possible. Hence the whole
| decentralisation bit. Tbh ipv6 can also achieve the same
| goals but at the cost of de-anonymization since it's a unique
| marker.
| pedalpete wrote:
| Is that really the technology capability that has been
| added? I'm not sure you can talk about decentralized Web3
| without talking about blockchain.
|
| I credit much of Web2 kicking off with AJAX, HTML5, and
| CSS3. Though many others would say it was lead by mobile.
|
| My general thoughts, it isn't one thing, or just one
| technology. Even Web1 was a combination of TCP/IP, HTML,
| HTTP, and Mosaic/Netscape.
| jakobnissen wrote:
| I think people will soon realize that code is a data structure,
| not text.
|
| Like a hash map or an array, its text representation is merely a
| human-readable interface to it. I predict the capabilities of
| IDEs will expand, and to make their state persistent, they will
| begin to store IDE-specific files in your source code directory.
| Eventually this will morph into the source code itself being
| stored in binary format and opened/searched by editors.
|
| The programming language Unity is pioneering in this domain, but
| they are too far ahead of their time. The transition to code-as-
| data will be gradual.
| feoren wrote:
| When I see people talking about storing code in an AST
| representation or something similar, I see people who are
| focusing on the "happy path" and not really thinking about
| _why_ code-as-text has been so sticky for half a century.
|
| (1) Code spends a huge amount of time in a non-parsable state.
| I need to be able to save code even when it's not currently
| parsable into a valid AST of the language I am writing.
| Sometimes I even need to check in this code to my source
| control. You cannot have the primary storage of your code be
| valid, parsed syntax trees for this reason, so you need to
| invent a brand new format that is different from both text and
| the AST being modeled. This format needs to be optimized for
| programmer workflow, clarity, and communication; _not_
| optimized for the machine.
|
| (2) You need to re-invent how source control works for your
| representation if you're not using text. This actually has a
| lot of potential -- syntax-aware merging done well would be a
| godsend. But this is a huge undertaking to do well, and problem
| 1 rears its head strongly here as well.
| oumua_don17 wrote:
| >> people will soon realize that code is a data structure, not
| text
|
| Are you being tongue in cheek because most haven't realised it
| in 63 years!!!
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language)
| mcphage wrote:
| > I think people will soon realize that code is a data
| structure, not text.
|
| Always 5 years out, like nuclear fusion. :-(
| throwaway24124 wrote:
| Not personally excited for this, but I think the next big thing
| will be the internet and computers becoming "hyper-transactional"
| through crypto. I believe this is what companies like Facebook
| are really pushing toward when they talk about Web 3.0 and the
| metaverse. It will still, for the most part, be the same internet
| accessed through phones and computers, but videogame-style micro-
| transactions powered by crypto will become part of most websites
| to access content. Since every site having micro-transactions
| would probably piss off a lot of the general population, I think
| there will also be an explosion of new ways to earn very small
| amounts of crypto online, by doing mechanical turk style tasks,
| playing a new game, creating a bit of content for someone, etc.
| Average consumers will earn these small amounts of crypto, then
| immediately spend them on the content they want.
| clpm4j wrote:
| I wonder if this starts to pan out whether it might lead to
| something like the below comment regarding reduced consumption
| of digital media. I can see a scenario where the majority of
| businesses/apps/sites that implement this see a significant
| drop in traffic. Generally, people like stuff for free, and
| even though the expression of anti-advertising is in vogue, I
| find it hard to believe that the majority of people would
| choose paying any amount over a free/ad-induced version.
| xchaotic wrote:
| I also hope this doesn't happen, but it's a valid scenario.
| andredeen wrote:
| Wearables, as soon as fix the power.
| NotThe1Pct wrote:
| clavicat wrote:
| Hopefully, realizing how unnecessarily shitty and bloated nearly
| all existing software is and rediscovering an appreciation for
| simplicity, reliability, and performance. There's so much low-
| hanging fruit to be picked yet we let it rot on the vine.
|
| Projects like Zig I think are the first signs that we are getting
| fed up with what we have.
| alex_duf wrote:
| there's actually one angle that I believe has changed on that
| topic: security.
|
| Security is to me the number 1 reason to reduce bloat in any
| application. By limiting the number of external dependencies,
| and maybe even the number of features, you end up with a more
| secure product.
|
| It something that didn't matter as much a decade ago, but is
| now very relevant.
|
| Then there's all the other reasons, like responsiveness,
| download size, developer experience etc, but they haven't been
| the priority of most businesses
| thom wrote:
| Better, simpler data flow frameworks. Represent all your
| business's logic declaratively, or at least succinctly. Connect
| up all the inputs, batch or streaming. The platform automagically
| maintains your data, always consistent and up-to-date. Apps are
| just views on top of this that trigger more events later. Find a
| bug in some of your logic? Fix it and the entire dataset
| refreshes, with policies on how you want to deal with external
| integrations that trigger off the back of that. This is what a
| lot of enterprise data infrastructure already looks like, but
| cobbled together and slow and buggy. I don't think adding no/low
| code on top of that really moves the needle. Make it painless and
| joyful from beginning to end.
|
| If you're thinking of wearables, I personally don't think there's
| anything interesting there until someone can work out a decent
| high-bandwidth way of communicating with your device. Gimme
| something like subvocalisation that doesn't require me to wear
| something stupid or talk out loud.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| Unpopular opinion, but chase old things, not new ones.
|
| The big investment in your career will be ideas that stand the
| test of time. Relational Databases, data structures, programming
| paradigms, math, etc. Even in machine learning, just knowing core
| statistics and regression is more important than
| HottestNewArchitecture :TM:.
|
| Learn the ideas underneath these ideas, and you'll really grow
| and be able to better evaluate / learn new ideas.
| typon wrote:
| When it comes to machine learning, yes it is important to know
| statistical methods, but at this point deep learning shouldn't
| be pejoratively referred to as the HottestNewArchitecture. If
| you want to solve previously unsolved problems, deep learning
| is necessary; and if you want more specific advice, learn how
| transformers work. This class of models is qualitatively
| different in the kinds of problems they unlock as solvable.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| I don't disagree. But I think
|
| (a) Important stepwise changes in a domain are actually rarer
| than we think. Transformers & deep learning being one good
| example.
|
| (b) Focusing on the background information prepares you for
| that stepwise change, and recognize the stepwise change when
| it happens
|
| Instead of trying to suss out from the tech literatti every
| new thing and chase that, I'd rather spend my time on "old
| things" and be better prepared for the right stepwise
| changes.
|
| There's a lot of 'revolutionary' and 'big ideas' that in
| reality are marketing and/or repackaging old ideas.
| derekp7 wrote:
| This reminds me of when I took a class on Sun Cluster. The
| instructor went to the Sun developers for his training, took
| everything they "invented" and drew parallels to items he had
| back in his mainframe and mini days. Turns out, nothing new was
| invented, just re-invented.
| dmos62 wrote:
| When you say relational databases, do you mean SQL databases in
| particular?
| majewsky wrote:
| Not OP, but I'm going to answer "yes" from my own personal
| perspective. As a backend developer in a team mostly
| comprised of other backend developers, I'm constantly
| surprised by how much the average developer fears dropping
| down into SQL (as opposed to working in whatever ORM their
| language offers) and how much it impedes their admin work not
| to be able to interact with their database to find
| inconsistencies, pull reports and such.
| brazilian_ds wrote:
| > Even in machine learning, just knowing core statistics and
| regression is more important than HottestNewArchitecture :TM:.
|
| Agreed! In my earlies as a data scientist, I was always looking
| forward to implementing deep learning and new fancy algorithms.
|
| For some real use cases, the explainability provided by a
| simple regression is better than a more complex algorithm that
| provides the best metric.
| berkes wrote:
| Piling on "ideas that stand the test of time":
|
| - Architecture/patterns. Managing complexity, now and in
| future, is the primary thing that differentiates a "senior"
| from a junior IMO. Making complex stuff simple is extremely
| difficult.
|
| - CI/CD. Improving "shippability" and "shipfriendlyness" helps
| efficiency and allows getting your software to customers
| faster.
|
| - TDD/BDD/DDD. Ability to distill features and value from vague
| customer-feedback and domain-expert. Committing that in
| specifications, and turning that into automated, and measurable
| setups. the #1 skill to building software that helps your
| users, IMO.
|
| While there will remain a shortage of developers in near
| future, the absolute amount of people producing software will
| grow significant. The amount of software produced will grow
| significant while existing software will continue to be there
| too.
|
| The only way to stand out is to provide real value. To provide
| that fast. To continue providing that. And to remain able to
| react to the market quickly.
|
| I therefore believe that skills and techniques that allow you
| to move faster, be more efficient today and in future, is far
| more important than learning about web3, kafka, rust, go,
| kotlin, no-code, or the latest JS framework.
| samcgraw wrote:
| > The big investment in your career will be ideas that stand
| the test of time.
|
| This is spot on in my experience.
|
| As I grow in my career as a software engineer, it's funny how
| much more often I notice that the things that set one apart in
| the field is a level-headed understanding of the fundamentals
| and a calm resolve to take into consideration what's worked in
| the past, much more than one's ability to "chase the shiny".
|
| Honorable mention of the Lindy Effect [1] here - one of my
| favorite ideas from Antifragile [2].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect [2]
| https://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-Ince...
| bawolff wrote:
| I think a big part also - new ideas often dont have info on
| how they fail- its all hype. However old ideas do, so if you
| can link them, its easier to use the new technology
| appropriately.
| rootsudo wrote:
| So true. For me it has become RegEx, Email, Email
| Servers/security, Excel, and sorting. Never thought I'd go on
| about it, but man. It apparently is my niche.
| xchaotic wrote:
| Thanks. It's the same for me, actually - I built a lot of
| my career around XML and other W3C standards and the great
| thing about those, while complicated is that you can refer
| to a well defined spec to see what the behaviour SHOULD be.
| But I'm hoping it's not either/or question - I can continue
| learning software architecture patterns and anti-pattern
| but perhaps there is some new, realtively untapped market
| or end-user experience where this can be leveraged.
| mamcx wrote:
| Specially when the "old things" are over-represented by things
| like C/C++/Shell, Unix and not Pascal/ADA,
| HyperCard/DBase/FoxPro (your "low-code" from the past!), Amiga,
| BeOS, etc
|
| A LOT of the old things were ahead of the time and forgotten.
| Also, a lot are still in their infancy (I think RDBMs are still
| too immature!).
|
| Is likely that marrying that old things with (1, at most 2) new
| things is the way to go.
| eitland wrote:
| Deno is the thing I think I can realistically hope for as a
| technological breakthrough in 2022.
|
| If it does it can become huge. Not because of TypeScript as a
| native language. Not because it can create binaries. Not because
| it has an audited standard library or any other good reason.
|
| But because it includes a simple but flexible way to prevent
| itself from doing things the author didn't want it to.
|
| If we are extremely lucky other platforms will pick this up.
| aaron695 wrote:
| kevinwang wrote:
| It's still ai/ml, I'd say.
| whoomp12342 wrote:
| oh man, its distributed cloud, Xaas, hyperautomatin, xr,
| quantum computing, VUI, CNPs, and a multi experience.
|
| Sorry I ran out of buzzwords
| lxi92 wrote:
| Notches.
| nicoburns wrote:
| I'm not sure if it will end up being the case, but I would like
| to hope that open firmware and/or hardware will become a big
| thing in the next decade. Open source software has been such a
| game changer, and it would be amazing if we could realise the
| same benefits in the embedded/hardware sphere.
| axegon_ wrote:
| I second this and for several major reasons:
|
| 1. Prices are down(yes, lower down your guns). I'm not talking
| about CPUs or GPUs but embedded products. It's absolutely mind
| blowing that you can get the computational power of a mid-90's
| computer with the size of a coin for just a few bucks. Same
| goes for sensors, transceivers, motors and communication
| modules.
|
| 2. 3D printing has come a long way, also dirt cheap and easily
| accessible to people and is yet another game changer for
| prototyping. Essentially you can have a functional part in your
| hands in a day.
|
| 3. With works towards lowering carbon footprint(further
| amplified by inflation), smart devices with low footprint will
| become more popular-anything which will lower costs. It may
| sound counter intuitive at first glance but you can imagine how
| a smart home/office/factory/store/restaurant/anything could be
| more efficient if power consumption is managed in the most
| efficient way possible and likely far better than you ever
| could.
|
| 4. Open firmware and hardware is going to be a game changer in
| another area which seemed completely out of reach just a few
| years ago - space exploration. Even there, the prices have
| dropped massively. And there's one more thing when it comes to
| space exploration: I know that people are really on both
| extremes when it comes to opinions on Elon Musk but here are my
| thoughts: ignore what he says and pay attention to what he
| does. I'm not entirely sure that he's right on electric cars
| and I suspect that he might not be on the winning side if
| synthetic fuels become widely available. The one thing which
| makes me sway towards them are the billions Porsche is pouring
| into research in that area and credit where it's due: they have
| been right throughout the entirety of the automotive history.
|
| 5. Industrial purposes. Again looking at what Elon Musk is
| doing - I think he is giving us a glimpse of what Industrial
| revolution 2.0 might look like. And again something which was
| further fueled by the pandemic.
|
| The one thing that I see truly missing in the picture is cheap,
| fast and easy way to make PCB prototypes - that is still an
| expensive and complicated endeavor. Or at least I am not aware
| of a cheap and efficient way to do this. I've personally gone
| as far as trying to figure out a way to use conductive paint
| for that purpose. With 0 success so far I'm afraid.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| How cheap do you want PCBs to be? They're already at the
| point where shipping costs dominate the price.
| https://jlcpcb.com/
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| If you 3D print your own, you don't have to pay the
| shipping ;-)
| xchaotic wrote:
| This is definitely an area that is going to grow. I think
| most of the initial growth will be in the low-end, cheap,
| disposable projects - stuff for managing your home (IoT), for
| example where you want as much control over the whole stack
| as possible. The current IoT hype has blown over a little,
| but the need to control various things around you in an
| intelligent and safe way is still an unsolved problem, worth
| exploring further.
| axegon_ wrote:
| > The current IoT hype has blown over a little
|
| I don't think it ever picked up: It was trying to solve a
| problem which didn't exist at the time. In the mid 2010's
| when they started popping up, the economy was growing and
| most of climate change, lowering carbon footprints and all
| that was seen as "Greta Thunberg's pretentious and
| delusional world" to working class citizens. And for the
| most part that still would have been the case if it wasn't
| for covid and the accompanying inflation. I don't think
| average Joe has learned a lesson from it or realizing how
| fragile our economy is. Almost like enforced necessity:
| "hey my electric bill is 4 times what it used to be" opens
| a new market. The ecosystem however was(and sadly still is)
| appalling: You get a hama wifi enabled light bulb, you need
| to download their app to set it up. You buy a Phillips one
| a few months later and you need to download yet another app
| to set it up. Not to mention the absolute hell that are
| both google home and alexa. Worst of all is that there are
| no efforts to open source alternatives(home assistant
| technically relies on either google or amazon). Privacy
| aside, their interfacing options are equally annoying. I do
| have a few wifi enabled light bulbs and I turn them on for
| my dog when I'm not at home through google and it is just
| as messy as it was on day one.
| Maxburn wrote:
| Me too, I recently started using OpenWRT and I'm blown away.
| Also used pfSense for years.
| imglorp wrote:
| There is a mountain of gatekeeping at the CPU, motherboard, and
| firmware levels that benefits only governments and
| manufacturers. It will need to be routed around or tunneled
| through at each layer.
| bawolff wrote:
| I don't know, but i'm pretty sure its going to be nothing that's
| listed here.
|
| Everything listed here is stuff at the high end of the hype
| cycle. Everyone is already looking at it. The next big thing is
| going to be something nobody is looking at. If people are already
| looking, it would have already happened.
| justin66 wrote:
| Plastics.
| tyronehed wrote:
| zachlatta wrote:
| Right now I am super excited about computer graphics, high speed
| consumer networking (10gbe in homes with wireless to match!),
| high quality home-built CNC and 3D printing machines (like the
| Prusa machines), and VR!
| goalieca wrote:
| Security is going to be the next big thing.
|
| I'm hoping for a small revolution in 3rd party libs and a locking
| down on the supply chain as a start.
| wepple wrote:
| I agree. Security/privacy aren't going to become less of a
| problem, and knowing what is actually running on our systems is
| a remarkably unsolved problem.
| Winterflow3r wrote:
| TinyML - running ML models on devices with severely limited power
| supplies
| [deleted]
| jeppesen-io wrote:
| ARM will continue to make inroads in the server space as adoption
| picks up and as more and more projects target that architecture
|
| Personal bias talking, but I'd expect to see modest uptick in
| Nix[os] interest
|
| Kubernetes will transition from new and exciting to a mature
| platform. Expect less new big features and more minor
| improvements
| throwaway24124 wrote:
| Genuinely curious, I've heard of Nix OS but I don't know
| anything about it. Why do you think interest will grow, and
| would you recommend it?
| jeppesen-io wrote:
| I love it, but I'd hold off on recommending it outright for
| everyone. There's a learning curve to be sure and if you run
| software not provided in its packing system it can take time
| to port to the Nix way
|
| Just about everything in a NixOS is configured in a
| declarative way, but that only really scratches the surface.
| It's the first Linux OS I've used that configuration is done
| at a wholistic level
|
| Say for example you have a RHEL/Debian Linux server and you
| want to see how it's configured. This sounds easy, but can be
| quite time consuming. You can see what packages are installed
| but then you'd need to examine all the /etc files. Try and
| see which ones are modified. Look at all services, look for
| further configuration that may exist in /opt or /usr. When
| you get to a certain scale tools like Chef, Puppet or Salt
| tend to help with managing configuration. Over time to meet
| compliance and monitoring requirements configuration can
| grow. And that's not getting into any filesystem permissions
| you may set.
|
| If you're using `yum install` or `apt-get` to install
| packages out of the system repos, you'll get the latest
| package in that repo. Run that command at different times,
| you can get a different package version
|
| In NixOS the system and packages are versioned together;
| makes for very reproducible systems. The downside/upside
| (depending on your needs) is, updating your kernel will
| update your packages in lockstep
|
| With NixOS, you can configure a complete system with a single
| file making Chef, Puppet or Salt obsolete. Once you get over
| that first hurdle of using NixOS and moving your workloads to
| it, it tends to be easier to maintain
|
| The major downside I run into is that most of the world does
| not use Nix[OS]. So if you need something not provided by
| Nix[OS], you'll need to learn how to make your own package
| (derivation)
|
| There are many caveats to everything I said above, but its
| the general idea
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| Regulatory technology will dominate for the rest of 2020s, while
| we are trying to replace the Wild West of unregulated Internet
| with something that has less negative effects on society and less
| overhead.
|
| Privacy and accessibility are extremely difficult and challenging
| tasks. Fake news, disinformation, echo chambers and cultural
| bubbles are growing problems. We basically need to rebuild plenty
| of things that are part of our daily life, and this will distract
| significant resources from the ,,next big things". More likely
| digital society 2.0 _is_ the next big thing, that will replace
| Meta and Google.
| mmmBacon wrote:
| As we hit physical limits of what we can power and cool, I expect
| software will have to be more aware of those limits.
|
| Heterogeneous computing is going to be the norm in everything.
| Since we've trained a generation of programmers to be hardware
| unaware, there is going to be increasing need for people who can
| understand all the concepts of how to tie all these different
| devices together to keep this huge group of people productive. I
| would also lump network devices into this category as the trend
| to disaggregate accelerates and lower latency access
| protocols/methods are needed.
|
| Embedded SW is going to be more important as devices get more
| powerful. If we are truly to see AR devices I think this is
| definitely the case. The difference between FW/SW will continue
| to blur. Will also need people who understand HW to best optimize
| for power consumption.
|
| Power consumption aware computing and profiling. As we hit
| physical limits of power density in data centers, we will need
| good ways to profile power consumption of code and power based
| optimization of code. This is obviously a thing already in mobile
| devices. But expect power aware computing to become more and more
| prevalent everywhere over time.
| rocgf wrote:
| I'm really just a mediocre software developer, I don't have any
| special insight.
|
| But to me it looks like some things to keep on the radar: quantum
| computers, machine learning and more applications of it, possibly
| blockchain/smart contracts (I'm very unsure about this one).
| RedBeetDeadpool wrote:
| Hyper IOTization. I'm coining the term.
|
| - pots that tell you when they are hot.
|
| - bikes that say their tires are flat.
|
| - weights that track how many reps you did.
|
| - shoes that tell you: stop landing on your heels so hard.
|
| - pillboxes that shove pills down your throat.
|
| - pillboxes that shove politics down your throat.
|
| - chargers that tell you their pronouns are he/him.
|
| - coffee mugs that tell you weather.
|
| - pants that say you've worn them too long.
|
| - windshields that tell you to stop texting.
|
| - food containers that tell you maybe you shouldn't eat that
| leftover casserole.
|
| IOT is gonna be the next big thing, get on the hype train cause
| this ones for real. Don't be left behind still writing SQL.
| thecleaner wrote:
| > shoes that tell you: stop landing on your heels so hard.
|
| This might happen quite quickly. Thing is how you walk and how
| much you abuse your legs can be a major source of problems like
| shot knees in the long run. And these things creep, they don't
| just happen quickly so you can't remedy it so fast.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Already exists. I managed a project for a well-known company
| in the sneaker industry that sends gait & foot pressure data
| from the shoe to an app and they have been working on this
| for probably close to a decade at this point. I can only
| assume that they've decided that commercialization outside
| the niche of Olympic athletes isn't worthwhile.
|
| And they are definitely not the only player since I recall
| writing some similar code for another organization in that
| field.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > pots that tell you when they are hot.
|
| Tell you how? Send you a text? Yeah, no. Do not need.
|
| Tell you verbally (because they expect that you're within
| earshot of the kitchen)? _Maybe._
|
| > bikes that say their tires are flat.
|
| Useful, even if they do it by text.
|
| > weights that track how many reps you did.
|
| Marginally useful. I can count fairly well.
|
| > shoes that tell you: stop landing on your heels so hard.
|
| Useful, but most people won't want them.
|
| > pillboxes that shove pills down your throat.
|
| Pillboxes that _remind_ you to take your pills are useful for
| those who are forgetful.
|
| "Shove"? Not my pills. I presume that was sarcasm, but if it
| wasn't, I own a sledgehammer.
|
| And that's my answer to most of the rest of your list. I won't
| buy it; if I _can 't_ buy something without it, I'll disable it
| if at all possible.
| badrabbit wrote:
| Confidential computing and Web 3.0 type computing where servers
| never touch user data. I also predict apps being developed to
| support non-ad revenue stream. And I don't think the IoT hype is
| done yet, especially if you include things like wearables.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Homomorphic encryption, if perfected would revolutionize cloud
| computing. Imagine if you didn't have to trust the nodes, people
| could sell spare clock cycles from their personal machines.
| Delphiza wrote:
| Anything in sustainability.
|
| Climate change and related issues are driving big changes that
| large corporates are already having to address regardless of
| impending legislation.
|
| Energy efficiency, waste management, sustainable computing,
| carbon markets, regulatory compliance and reporting (ISO50001),
| smart grids, EV logistics... there are so many areas.
|
| Anything that you choose to focus on next year will be immensely
| valuable and important when the demand suddenly picks up before
| the end of the decade. You can build up on your existing
| technical foundations.
| emteycz wrote:
| VR/AR will be big one day.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| In 2030 we will be finally talking about going to mass market
| with AR and wider adoption by professionals and it will take
| another 10-15 years for it to become ubiquitous.
|
| VR will never be a thing outside of gaming, porn and education.
| WA wrote:
| And chatbots
|
| /s
| RedBeetDeadpool wrote:
| I actually like this answer. While I think the fact that "Meta"
| is now focusing on this feeds into a lot of hype, I don't think
| they are too far off base. The technology is finally getting
| usable, and the technology ecosystem necessary to allow it to
| be useful is mostly there. My analogy to this is that its in
| the brick phone phase of the mid 80's. Functional, bulky, seen
| as either a toy/gag, but has a core demographic of power users.
| [deleted]
| edhelas wrote:
| My colleague and boss in 2014, 2016, 2017...
| emteycz wrote:
| Well that's on them, nobody in their right mind would say
| that people are gonna like having big bulky computer thingy
| on their head.
|
| That doesn't mean we won't be getting laser retinal
| projection in the next 10-20 years.
| edhelas wrote:
| That doesn't mean it will also not happen :) Hoping for a
| technology doesn't make it appear one day.
| aardvark179 wrote:
| If I had to guess at one thing that will become of increasing
| importance over the next decade it would be privacy and security
| related to that. I think some jurisdictions will force this
| issue, and companies will have to start treating large amounts of
| personal data that might be stolen as a liability rather than an
| asset.
|
| This is likely to be a business change as much as a technological
| one, but it's definitely going to have an effect.
| edhelas wrote:
| Reducing the usage and having an actual degrowth of electronic
| devices consumption, and especially power consumption.
|
| If we are not choosing to go there, physics will teach us the
| hard way (it already begun).
|
| Basically any region/country that is able to do the same, with
| less hardware, less energy will have a big advantage over the
| other regions/countries in the upcoming years.
| cinntaile wrote:
| Hardware has gotten more power hungry over the years not less.
| As long as people are more expensive than energy/hardware, I
| don't see this changing anytime soon. Maybe we'll get better at
| utilizing our high performance hardware by offloading the
| computations more and more to the cloud but overall energy
| usage will likely keep going up. Growing economies and cheap,
| abundant energy go hand in hand.
| majewsky wrote:
| > Hardware has gotten more power hungry over the years not
| less.
|
| Hardware has massively improved in the power/watt and
| computation/joule categories. The increased power consumption
| is because of rebound effect. If we really only used
| cellphones for telephone calls and SMS, we could build them
| to last for months on a single charge. Yet we have to charge
| them every day because they are built to do not just
| telephony, but also maps, reservations, banking, 3D games,
| and so on and so forth.
| cinntaile wrote:
| I'm aware of the efficiency gains, it doesn't change what I
| said though. Power consumption for computing won't go down
| anytime soon in my opinion.
| Zababa wrote:
| > Yet we have to charge them every day because they are
| built to do not just telephony, but also maps,
| reservations, banking, 3D games, and so on and so forth.
|
| While I agree with you here, I feel like people don't try
| to optimize an already working base. For example, I
| recently updated the clock app on my android phone. There
| is no difference in functionality in the new app, but it
| has the android 12 design. This time could have been spent
| optimizing the app in a way or another. I do the same thing
| on my phone as I did 5/6 years ago: read a lot online,
| sometimes listen to music, sometimes look at maps,
| sometimes use apps, telephony. My battery lasts longer
| these days, but not as much because my phone also has to
| show sweet animations and be able to run high-performance
| stuff (I made the error of buying a flagship phone).
| dmos62 wrote:
| Things don't seem to be going there. We had dumb phones lasting
| around a week in the 00s, then switched to semi-cordless
| smartphones that need to be charged sometimes more than once a
| day. Same for RAM and CPU usage, when looking at browsers. We,
| developers, seem to expand our resource usage to consume
| whatever is available, irregardless of some theoretical minimum
| we could be aiming for.
| dhux wrote:
| I would say webassembly.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Hope so!
| mrfusion wrote:
| Multimodal transformers
| tester756 wrote:
| I don't think anything BIG is going to happen in next half of
| decade
|
| I bet that:
|
| autonomous cars will still suck.
|
| CPU will just get lower and lower, but nothing fancy except maybe
| weird shapes concepts.
|
| web (browsers) will still introduce some weird not privacy
| friendly stuff.
|
| FP-ish languages ain't gonna be mainstream, probably nothing cool
| enough for purists and good enough for mainstream will appear.
|
| decreasing energy usage seems to be irrelevant cuz people will
| use that energy in other way anyway.
|
| quant computer still just fancy thing in lab.
|
| __________________
|
| or I've found one that I hope will be big! air purifier's cost
| and efficency improvements! shit's so expensive, yet so important
| bflesch wrote:
| Automation of real-world things (robotics)
| nathias wrote:
| Crypto by another name.
| _eht wrote:
| Web3!
| conor_f wrote:
| I think that decentralization is coming in a big way. The myriad
| of scandals and corruption surrounding the largest tech companies
| being one of many push forces, and platforms supporting self
| hosting with little technical expertise and products encouraging
| the same being pull forces.
|
| A small bit of confirmation for this in my mind is the increase
| in companies switching to a business model that is aware of this.
| "We will host it for you for a fee, but we fully support self-
| hosting too." ala Gitlab and Ghost
| (https://ghost.org/docs/hosting/)
| kristov wrote:
| I am possibly alone in thinking the biggest thing to happen in
| computing in the 80s/90s was the spreadsheet. Having an
| immeasurable affect on the productivity of organizations large
| and small, to this day. So what does the 21st century version of
| the spreadsheet look like?
| null_shift wrote:
| no/low code tools that are accessible/useable by the masses.
| maxlamb wrote:
| Airtable?
| wrnr wrote:
| At the other end of no/low code there is adoption of advanced
| computer graphics techniques that originated game programming and
| machine learning that focus around the GPU.
|
| * Better GPU API on web and native with WebGPU
|
| * Use of compute shaders to interface with trained NN models or
| to "replace" css.
|
| * Easy reactive programming using immediate mode UI powered by
| GPU instead of CPU
|
| * Data driven design ala ECS where your ECS lives in the cloud.
|
| Not just for 3D AR/VR but also business/productivity apps in 2D.
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